My Take | Are Hong Kong schoolchildren being brainwashed?
- Educational approaches to grim moments in Chinese history have understandably sparked uproar and put the focus on Hong Kong teachers from the post-1990s generation and social unrest
Hong Kong’s chief executive has warned against teachers instructing young pupils with their own ideology and “fallacious arguments”. Obligingly, Ip Kin-yuen, education lawmaker and vice-president of the 100,000-member Professional Teachers’ Union, immediately blasted Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor for “insulting” teachers.
I know some of my faithful readers would say that it was merely posing an analytical question. Sure, maybe next time, our examiners could ask whether the Nazi Holocaust did more good than harm to European Jews.
Interestingly, a DSE manager was found to have posted a related opinion this year on Facebook, “If there was no Japanese occupation, would there be a new China?”
The implication is that the Japanese invasion laid the groundwork for the Chinese Communist Party’s rise to power.
Ip again defended the manager, saying the criticism and warnings by the government were “an invasion of privacy”. But wait, the manager and another DSE colleague were exposed by two newspapers, not the government.